Equality, Thanks To Capitalism

According to the latest Labor Department data, women now outnumber men among nonfarm payroll employees by 64.2 million to 63.4 million. As Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago has explained, this number is a bit misleading, as it fails to capture seasonal differences in employment. The construction industry, which remains heavily male, tends to shed jobs in the winter months, and one can easily imagine the balance between women and men in the workforce shifting once again in a few months time. But something important really has changed over the last 30 years, and the best way to understand the world we've left behind is to watch director Niki Caro's 2005 film North Country.

Based in truth but heavily fictionalized, the movie is set in Reagan's America, during the last truly severe recession for blue-collar men. It tells the story of Josey Aimes, a single mother fleeing an abusive husband who finds a decent wage working in a mine in her bleak Minnesota hometown. It's the same place her father has worked for decades, but the men who work the mine--her father included--sense at a gut level that the women's movement, as embodied by Josey and her fellow female workers, will mean greater competition for work that had once been the exclusive preserve of men. Their blue-collar jobs, their way of life and the hard-won dignity they attached to it is on the way out.

Rather than see the enemy as corporate headquarters or finance capital, they focus their rage on the woman who has dared to work alongside them. The men wage what amounts to a terror campaign against Josey, and eventually she sues her employer--successfully--for creating a hostile workplace environment.

The moral of the story is murkier than it appears, and it has deep relevance for the era into which the United States is headed: Josey is a heroine and a victim, but the villains, the vicious male chauvinists, also see themselves as victims. They are victims of changing economic circumstances, and more deeply, of the humiliation that comes from being rendered historically obsolete. They've been left orphaned by the death of a cosseted domestic industrial economy.

One inevitable consequence of the increased supply of female labor, as the villains of North Country implicitly understood, is that male wage growth has been relatively restrained since the 1970s just as women's wages have increased dramatically from a low starting point. While many Americans rail against foreign trade and immigrants for holding down the wages of native-born men, female workers, perhaps best understood as invisible immigrants, have played a far greater role in intensifying wage competition.

Even now, many on the left celebrate the income inequality of midcentury America, not recognizing that it was built on the subjection of women. Because women had so few professional opportunities, children and taxpayers enjoyed the services of severely underpaid female schoolteachers. Yet those schoolteachers were never given the compensation or respect they deserved, nor was the broader society able to draw on their talent and energy to enhance the productive efficiency of various other sectors. Political elites, almost exclusively male, used the power of government to defend male economic power, intentionally and unintentionally.

In the New Deal era, the government collaborated with labor unions to enforce wage discrimination in favor of male "breadwinners." In recent decades, the heavily male construction sector has received untold subsidies that have propped up wages for less-skilled men, while less-skilled women have been relegated to less lucrative work. As a result, women remain overrepresented in the public sector and particularly in the "caring professions" that were once the only job opportunities available to women.

But those days are drawing to a close. Powerful male-dominated interests, from Sunbelt home builders to Rustbelt auto manufacturers to the defense sector, continue to game the political process, seeking subsidies and protection at every turn. In the end, dynamic capitalism has proven the most formidable ally of women fighting the last redoubts of entrenched male power. As women gain skills and experience, profit-making enterprises need them desperately. That, and not command-and-control regulation, is the reason the private sector is evolving to meet the distinctive needs of working women, many of whom demand more flexible schedules than a 1950s-style salaryman. So while the gender breakdown of nonfarm payroll employees will go back and forth, we are, whether male-dominated interests like it or not, destined for gender equality.